Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Winds of War: 9-11 Six Years Later

Maybe it’s because we haven’t had another terrorist attack on our soil since 9/11. Or maybe many Americans are buying into the liberal Left’s assertion that the threat of terrorism is a neo-con plot to stay in office. Whatever it is, though terrorists' desire to attack the United States remains strong, this fact has yet to be fully accepted by the American public.

America is still under threat of more and bigger terror attacks and that fact will not recede no matter how many time liberals want to believe that the WOT is just a bumper sticker.

Weapons of mass destruction, small boats packed with explosives and Islamic radicalization are the greatest terrorist threats facing the country, top U.S. security officials said Monday on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"The enemy is not standing still. They are constantly revising their tactics and adapting their strategy and their capabilities," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. "And if we stand still -- or worse yet, if we retreat -- we are going to be handing them an advantage that we dare not see them hold."

And while the department's goal is to keep nuclear weapons from entering the country, he said it also is focusing on how it would respond should a nuclear device get through and explode -- particularly how to identify and track the nuclear materials. Chertoff also said the department is putting in place new screening regulations that would require providing information on flight crews and passengers before a private aircraft departs from overseas bound for the United States.

And what about the loonies in Congress who would seek to disarm us of our intelligence weapons to track and prevent new terrorist attacks on our soil? Are they eager to help in the fight?

The U.S. has disrupted several homegrown plots and has helped disrupt overseas plots, most recently last week when three Islamic terror suspects were arrested in Germany. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said monitoring overseas conversations was key to catching the suspected German terrorists.

He stressed the importance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- known as FISA -- and said the country would lose half of the tools it uses to fight terrorism if lawmakers choose to roll back its powers. Congress updated the law last month, but civil liberties advocates and some leading congressional Democrats think the updated law gives the intelligence community too much surveillance power and want to revisit it to add more limits.

NEW YORK -- In a rare public address CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden warned of new attacks by al-Qaida:

"Our analysts assess with high confidence that al-Qaida's central leadership is planning high-impact plots against the U.S. homeland." Hayden's unusual public address was made at his request at the Council of Foreign Relations. The newly minted CIA chief also took the unusual step of making his appearance in military uniform, though as CIA director he is not on active military assignment.

The CIA director warned:

"We assess, with high confidence that al-Qaida is focusing on targets that would produce mass casualties, dramatic destruction and significant aftershocks."

A letter from the Ayn Rand Institute puts the threat to our country in no uncertain terms.

In making our arguments about the threat of Islamic totalitarianism and how to deal with it, we have not expected to fully convince politicians or most Americans of our conclusions—because the philosophy that enables us to come to those conclusions is not yet widespread. While honest listeners will be partially convinced by our arguments, they will often conclude that our principled, absolutist positions are too "extremist." Thus, despite our best efforts, American foreign policy continues to be disastrous; our government still has not clearly identified the enemy we are fighting, nor have we demonstrated the willingness to take the actions necessary to defeat even the enemies we have identified (such as al-Qaeda or the Iraqi insurgency).

This is fundamentally due to bad philosophy. Because our leaders accept the multiculturalist idea that all cultures are equal, they are reluctant to identify a clearly evil, militant ideological movement as a major aspect of Arab-Islamic culture; they would rather pretend that terrorists are "stateless," "un-Islamic" fanatics. Because our leaders are mostly religious, they are reluctant to identify that the terrorists are motivated by the desire to seriously practice their religion; instead, they make nonsensical claims like "Islam is peace." And because our leaders accept altruism, they believe it would be wrong to take devastating action necessary to defeat our enemies; they are far more comfortable sacrificing our soldiers for mob-rule in the Middle East.

To paraphrase one of our soldiers in Iraq - "America is at war and Americans are at the Mall."

zzzz........

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